Well, weve crested the halfway mark and are on the third post in Bretts week long series explaining how to get the most out of your eDM. Today we look at an often overlooked factor – getting the internals right.

1. Understanding ISPs as a meta-audience
2. Acquiring email addresses – the right way
3. Do the inside work
4. Content is king
5. Spam flags

Marketers do not work alone. Define the internal dependencies on which the success of your email campaign depends. Ensure that all customer touch points within your organisation, such as customer support or sales, know about upcoming campaigns.

Remember, many customers are touching or being touched by other facets of your organisation, maybe even within marketing. Increase your success by being consistent across all channels.

To make sure you’re doing your inside work, follow these three guidelines:

1. Ensure cross-organisational support for and knowledge of email campaigns. Using CRM applications, many marketers today make it a standard practice to check whether there’s an open customer support incident before sending out proactive emails. Similarly, some customer support organisations share incident information with marketing so they can follow up with timely emails regarding upgrades or new programs.

• Make sure you have the reporting tools in place to support campaign goals. This means you need a marketing automation application that tracks intended action completion, such as a form submittal, form download, or purchase. Integration between your web and email marketing tools is vital here.

• Review invalid contact reports. Stand by the integrity of your mailing list at all times. Be aware of how many contacts are invalidated with each mailing. Some undeliverables may be inevitable, but a high volume suggests the need to reevaluate or clean up your list.